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Eventually, clogging drain grills, the leaves would be the cause of flooded streets, stalled cars, delayed ambulances, and many small but welcome miseries.
Here in the blustery, dripping midday, Corky walked a charming residential neighborhood in Studio City. Sowing disorder.
He didn’t live here. He never would.
This was a working-class neighborhood, managerial- class at best. Intellectual stimulation in such a place would be hard to find.
He had driven here to take a walk.
Emergency-yellow, blazing canary, he nevertheless passed along these streets with complete anonymity, drawing as little notice as might a ghost whose substance was but a twist of ectoplasmic mist.
He had yet to encounter anyone on foot. Few cars traveled the quiet streets.
The weather kept most people snug indoors.
The glorious rotten weather was Corky’s fine conspirator.
At this hour, of course, most residents of these houses were away at work. Toiling, toiling, with stupid purpose.
Because this was a holiday week, children had not gone to school. Today: Monday. Christmas: Friday. Deck the halls.
Some children would be in the company of siblings. A lesser number would be under the protection of a nonworking mother.
Others were home alone.
In this instance, however, children were not Corky’s avenue of expression. Here, they were safe from the yellow ghost passing among them.
Anyway, Corky was forty-two. Kids these days were too savvy to open their doors to strange men.
Welcome disorder and lovely decadence had deeply infected the world in recent years. Now the lambs of all ages were growing wary.
He contented himself with lesser outrages, just happy to be out in the storm and doing a little damage.
In one of his capacious inner pockets, he carried a plastic bag of glittering blue crystals. A wickedly powerful chemical defoliant.
The Chinese military had developed it. Prior to a war, their agents would sow this stuff in their enemy’s farms.
The blue crystals withered crops through a twelvemonth growing cycle. An enemy unable to feed itself cannot fight.
One of Corky’s colleagues at the university had accepted a grant to study the crystals for the Department of Defense. They felt an urgent need to find a way to protect against the chemical in advance of its use.
In his lab, the colleague had a fifty-pound drum of the stuff. Corky had stolen one pound.
He wore thin protective latex gloves, which he could easily hide in the great winglike sleeves of his slicker.
The slicker was as much a serape as a coat. The sleeves were so voluminous that he could withdraw his arms from them, search his interior pockets, and slip into the sleeves again with fistfuls of one poison or another.
He scattered blue crystals over primrose and liriope, over star jasmine and bougainvillea. Azaleas and ferns. Carpet roses, lantana.
The rain swiftly dissolved the crystals. The chemical seeped into the roots.
In a week, the plants would yellow, drop leaves. In two weeks, they would collapse in a muck of reeking rot.
Large trees would not be affected by the quantities that Corky could scatter. Lawns, flowers, shrubs, vines, and smaller trees would succumb, however, in satisfying numbers.
He didn’t sow death in the landscaping of every house. One out of three, in no apparent pattern.
If an entire block of homes were blighted, neighbors might be drawn closer by the shared catastrophe. If some were untouched, they would become the envy of the afflicted. And might arouse suspicion.
Corky’s mission was not merely to cause destruction. Any fool could wreck things. He intended also to spread dissension, distrust, discord, and despair.
Occasionally a dog barked or growled from the shelter of a porch where it was tethered or from within a doghouse behind a board fence or a stone wall.
Corky liked dogs. They were man’s best friend, though why they would want to fill that role remained a mystery, considering the vile nature of humanity.
Now and then, when he heard a dog, he fished tasty biscuits from an inner pocket. He tossed them onto porches, over fences.
In the interest of societal deconstruction, he could put aside his love of dogs and do what must be done. Sacrifices must be made.
You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, and all that.
The dog biscuits were treated with cyanide. The animals would die far faster than the plants.
Few things would spread despair so effectively as the untimely death of a beloved pet.
Corky was sad. Sad for the luckless dogs.
He was happy, too. Happy that in a thousand little ways he daily contributed to the fall of a corrupt order—and therefore to the rise of a better world.
For the same reason that he didn’t damage the landscaping at every house, he didn’t kill every dog. Let neighbor suspect neighbor.
He wasn’t concerned that he would be caught in these poisonings. Entropy, the most powerful force in the universe, was his ally and his protecting god.
Besides, the at-home parents would be watching sleazy daytime talk shows on which daughters revealed to their mothers that they were whores, on which wives revealed to their husbands that they were having affairs with their brothers-in-law.
With school out, the kids would be busy learning homicidal skills from video games. Better yet, the pubescent boys would be surfing the Net for pornography, sharing it with innocent younger brothers, and scheming to rape the little girl next door.
Because he approved of those activities, Corky went about his work as discreetly as possible, so as not to distract these people from their self-destruction.
Corky Laputa was not merely a dreary poisoner. He was a man of many talents and weapons.
From time to time, as he plodded along the puddled walkways, under the drizzling trees, he indulged in melody. He sang “Singin’ in the Rain,” of course, which might be trite, but which amused him.
He did not dance.
Not that he couldn’t dance. Although not as limber and as right with rhythm as Gene Kelly, he could dazzle on any dance floor.
Capering along a street in a yellow slicker as roomy as any nun’s habit was, however, not wise behavior for an anarchist who preferred anonymity.
The streetside mailbox in front of each house always sported a number. Some boxes featured family names, as well.
Sometimes a name appeared to be Jewish. Stein. Levy. Glickman.
At each of these boxes, Corky paused briefly. He inserted one of the letter-size white envelopes that he carried by the score in another slicker pocket.
On each envelope, a black swastika. In each, two sheets of folded paper certain to instill fear and stoke anger.
On the first page, in bold block letters, were printed the words DEATH TO ALL DIRTY JEWS.
The photo on the second page showed bodies stacked ten deep in the furnace yard of a Nazi concentration camp. Under it in red block letters blazed the message YOU’RE NEXT.
Corky had no prejudice against the Jewish people. He held all races, religions, and ethnic groups in equal contempt.
At other special venues, he had distributed DEATH TO ALL DIRTY CATHOLICS notices, DEATH TO ALL BLACKS, and IMPRISON ALL GUN OWNERS.
For decades, politicians had been controlling the people by dividing them into groups and turning them against one another. All a good anarchist could do was try to intensify the existing hatreds and pour gasoline on the fires that the politicians had built.
Currently, hatred of Israel—and, by extension, all Jews—was the fashionable intellectual position among the most glamorous of media figures, including many nonreligious Jews. Corky was simply giving the people what they wanted.
Azalea to lantana to jasmine vine, dog to dog to mailbox, he journeyed through the rain-swept day. Seeding chaos.
Determined conspirators might be able to blow up skyscrapers and cause breathtaking destruction. Their work was helpful.
Ten thousand Corky Laputas—inventive, diligent— would in their quiet persistent way do more, however, to undermine the foundations of this society than all the suicide pilots and bombers combined.
For every thousand gunmen, Corky thought, I’drather have one hate-filled teacher subtly propagandizingin a schoolroom, one day-care worker with anunslakable thirst for cruelty, one atheist priest hidingin cassock and alb and chasuble.
By a circuitous route, he came within sight of the BMW where he had parked it an hour and a half earlier. Right on schedule.
Spending too much time in a single neighborhood could be risky. The wise anarchist keeps moving because entropy favors the rambler, and motion foils the law.
The dirty-milk clouds had churned lower during his stroll, coagulating into sooty curds. In the storm gloom, in the wet shade of the oak tree, his silver sedan waited as dark as iron.
Trailers of bougainvillea lashed the air, casting off scarlet petals, raking thorny nails against the stucco wall of a house, making sgraffito sounds: scratch-scratch, screek-screek.
Wind threw sheets, lashed whips, spun funnels of rain. Rain hissed, sizzled, chuckled, splashed.
Corky’s phone rang.
He was still half a block from his car. He would miss the call if he waited to answer it in the BMW.
He slipped his right arm out of its sleeve, under his slicker, and unclipped the phone from his belt.
Arm in sleeve again, phone to ear, toddling along as buttercup-yellow and as smile-evoking as any character in any TV program for children, Corky Laputa was in such a good mood that he answered the call by saying, “Brighten the corner where you are.”
The caller was Rolf Reynerd. As thick as Corky was yellow, Rolf thought he’d gotten a wrong number.
“It’s me,” Corky said quickly, before Reynerd could hang up.
By the time he reached the BMW, he wished he had never answered the phone. Reynerd had done something stupid.
CHAPTER 10 (#u822957d1-7db0-5eb9-b0ad-9212eb59d834)
BEYOND THE RESTAURANT WINDOW, falling rain as clear as a baby’s conscience met the city pavement and flooded the gutters with filthy churning currents.
Studying the photo of the jar full of foreskins, Hazard said, “Ten little hats from ten little proud heads? You think they could be trophies?”
“From men he’s murdered? Possible but unlikely. Anybody with that many kills isn’t the kind to taunt his victims first with freaky gifts in black boxes. He just does the job.”
“And if they were trophies, he wouldn’t give them away so easy.”
“Yeah. They’d be the central theme of his home decor. What I think is he works with stiffs. Maybe in a funeral home or a morgue.”
“Postmortem circumcisions.” Hazard twisted some string cheese onto his fork as he might have spun up a bite of spaghetti. “Kinky, but it’s got to be the answer, ’cause I haven’t heard about ten unsolved homicides where it looks like the perp might be a lunatic rabbi.” He dunked the string cheese in lebne and continued with lunch.
Ethan said, “I think he harvested these from cadavers for the sole purpose of sending them to Channing Manheim.”
“To convey what—that Chan the Man is a prick?”
“I doubt the message is that simple.”
“Fame doesn’t seem so appealing anymore.”
The fourth black box had been larger than the others. Two photos were required to document the contents.
In the first picture stood a honey-colored ceramic cat. The cat stood on its hind paws and held a ceramic cookie in each forepaw. Red letters on its chest and tummy spelled COOKIE KITTEN.
“It’s a cookie jar,” Ethan said.
“I’m such a good detective, I figured that out all by myself.”
“It was filled with Scrabble tiles.”
The second photo showed a pile of tiles. In front of the pile, Ethan had used six pieces to spell OWE and WOE.
“The jar contained ninety of each letter: O, W, E. Either word could be spelled ninety times, or both words forty-five times side by side. I don’t know which he intended.”
“So the nutball is saying, ‘I owe you woe.’ He thinks somehow Manheim has done him wrong, and now it’s payback time.”
“Maybe. But why in a cookie jar?”
“You could also spell wow,” Hazard noted.
“Yeah, but then you’re left with half the Os and all the Es not used, and they don’t make anything together. Only owe or woe uses all the letters.”
“What about two-word combinations?”
“The first one is weewoo. Which could mean ‘little love,’ I guess, but I don’t get the message in that one. The second is E-W-E, and woo again.”